As a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour;

1 Peter 5:8King James Version (KJV)

8 Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour:

I work Third Shift, in the kitchen at a casino. I actually have a pretty decent job, but some things about the place drive me up the wall.

For example, in the break room at least one TV is usually set to CNN, at least one more to FOX News, and the remainder will be on some random sports channel.

Now, I don't know why this is, except that my workplace seems to go with whatever the trends are and both-sides-ism and false equivalence is generally par for the course. Every so often somebody gets mad and changes the channel or shuts off FOX News. I've never seen anybody do that with CNN (although logic dictates it must have happened sometime.)

Last night on my lunch break, FOX News was on one of the TV's that happened to be in my field of view and on it was a replay of the first episode of "The Ingraham Angle" Laura Schlessinger's new show. Okay, whatever. I wasn't watching it, and I didn't hear until later that John Kelly was on there and insulted the collective intelligence of every historian, history buff, and anybody who has ever studied American (or American military, specifically) history...in the whole damned country...by saying that the Civil War was about failure to compromise and Robert E. Lee was an honorable man.

(No he wasn't, he was a fucking traitor who led armies against his fellow Americans in defense of treason and slavery. That is what any historian who is not automatically pro-Confederate will tell you.)

But anyway, I got to thinking about this later...you know, FOX News, that magical place where somehow, movement-Conservatives and right-wingers and various conspiracy theorists and fake military experts are never wrong, and everything gets blamed on liberals.

(FOX News polling also scored Donald Trump's approval rating at 38% the other day...just for the record...)

Now, the big news lately of course, is that Paul Manafort and Rick Gates have been indicted, and George Papadopoulos has plead guilty, and Trump seems to be having an epic flip-out about it (and while we're at it, FOX News seems to mostly be in a state of denial about the whole thing.) It's also quite possible that Mike Flynn, and others, will likely also be arrested.

Trump-Russia is a...if not the...top story on CNN, MSNBC, and most of the rest of the 24-hour news cycle. It has been, for a couple of days...

...And FOX News is busy trying to gloss over slavery?

I've yet to see FOX News say anything about the White Supremacist march in Shelbyville, TN (or the cancelled follow-up in Murfeesboro, but that's beside the point.) While I'm at it, the guy in the picture above, posing with the Russian flag while wearing a Hezbollah T-shirt (Hey, wait a minute, shouldn't this guy hate an armed Shi'a Islamist terror group, just on principle) is one of the organizers of that rally. Just as it's funny to me (as a former conservative) that today's "Conservatives" love them some Russians...it's equally ironic that they apparently love them some Shi'a Islamic Fundamentalist terrorists, so long as those terrorists regularly launch rockets at Jews and engage in regular firefights with Israeli Defense Force soldiers. (Israel also being a major military-and-otherwise ally of the United States and a darling of most of the American conservative movement and religious right despite their abortions, extensive social welfare, LGBT rights, national health care and, well, the fact that they're a-secular-Jewish-majority state that stubbornly refuses to believe in or play along with the right-wing Fundamentalist Christian apocalyptic narrative.)

Then there was this...

This was said on Russian social media by another one of the White Supremacist rally organizers.

Hold on, this motherfucker just specifically advocated both kidnapping and rape and systematic sexual abuse of white women specifically...

If this dude was Black, Brown or a Muslim of any color he'd already have been hunted down and be sitting in a cell and conservatives would be shitting their colons inside out in apoplectic rage.

...And rightly so. They should be doing that no matter what color the murderous asshole is nor what belief system they follow.

So why aren't they anyway? I mean, obviously this guy's fringe, and probably most people who don't go looking for this kind of shit won't find it...right?

Then there was this, a white woman bicycling, not hurting anything, minding her own business, who got handcuffed and put in the back of a police cruiser because something something gazpacho I felt threatened hand-waving silly bullshit.

I guarantee you, if that Officer was a man of color he'd likely have been relieved and placed on suspension the second this got out, and he'd likely have been fired already.

But no, white dude, so it's still being investigated. I'm just saying, police state much? Come on, people, this shit is ridiculous.

Then there's this guy...

Only a major, nationally known ministry and Christian-Right figure, effectively advocating for mass murder and nuclear war...

Praising a Presidential speech to that effect...

Nothing to see here, right?

Happens all the time.

No big deal, eh?

I read yesterday that the College of the Ozarks, a small Fundamentalist Christian college in southwestern Missouri, plans on instituting a mandatory "Patriotism course" that includes land navigation, PT (Physical Training) and rifle marksmanship. That is some serious Young Pioneers style Communist bullshit right there. I'm not joking, that was exactly the type of stuff that young people, from Elementary to High-school age did. Not just Russians or other East Bloc countries...but kids from Marxist-aligned countries the world over, or even the children of movements that might themselves have nothing to do with Communism but were supplied or supported by Communists. I still have a picture somewhere...I think it was a National Geographic poster...from back in the 1980's of Namibian and South African boys in full Young Pioneers getup on the Isle of the Pines in Cuba, standing at attention and shouting Communist slogans.

Is that what we're working towards here? Is that kind of thing Okay, so long as one can tag it with some sort of label of "Christian?"

I don't think it is, but I'm asking you. Do you actually think Communist-style indoctrination in the name of Christ is going to work?

I was born in the early 1970's, that and even more the 1980's was the era in which I grew up. I'm coming into my mid-40's now. I was raised a moderate conservative and a Christian in a very Republican era. I was taught to stand for certain things, yes, but also to think for myself. Now, on the other side of the coin: You gotta figure there are a lot of people like me, my age and up in the many nations that were part of the former Soviet Union...who grew up Communist and far-Leftist and went to their Young Pioneers meetings and were taught to inform on their parents and fellow students for the greater glory of the Revolution...

Seriously, how many of those people do you think are still Communists?

Christ, with the debatable exception of the Chinese and the Vietnamese, nobody calls themselves Communists anymore...and even the Chinese and the Vietnamese aren't really Communists, but rather Capitalists who believe it is glorious to get rich...but have this sort-of socialistic economy and all the legacy trappings of Mao's and Uncle Ho's revolutions, and the memory of which has been shaped by...rather than shaping...Chinese and Vietnamese traditional culture. Cabbies in China will carry idols to Mao in their cars to drive away evil spirits, and there literally is a Temple dedicated to Uncle Ho somewhere. The Chinese government periodically has to put out reminders that Mao Zedong should not be worshiped as a god.

Comrade Irony could not be reached for comment...

...And people wanna stick Jesus into this kind of framework? How does any of that fit in with the raping and murdering assholes mentioned above?

Listen, Fascism was defeated on the field of battle and damned well left there, dead, for a fucking reason. Communism was defeated, ultimately, by bluff and brinkmanship, better leadership, and the fact that capitalist economics and modern democracy could better sustain and support a modern military industrial complex and national budget and more importantly, sustain the people needed for both while providing enough of a measure of personal freedom that...fundamentally...the people on the other side wanted what we had.

Ultimately, the reason that both Communism and Fascism fell was because their internal logic did not hold up against reality. I think the same can safely be said about modern populist-driven "Conservatism" which like China's modern Communism, follows the previous generations movements in name only.

But it's worse than that, really.

Let's get real, conservatives, it's not so much that ya'll have clutched a viper to your collective breast and expected it not to bite you...it's that there are honestly, probably way more snakes than there are people at this point. Ya'll are like Indy and Marion in the Well of the Souls in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the Nazis have just sealed you in, saying "Maybe in a thousand years even you'll be worth something, Cucks!"

They don't care about you. Trump doesn't care about you. The various Nationalists seeking to rewire the global economy to dump money into their pockets don't care about you.

Perhaps more to the point, large segments of the voter base ya'll have cultivated for decades with racist talk and "Screw the liberals," tax cuts, various resentments and white rage...they don't give a shit about you, either.

Ya'll got a problem, and it's beyond my ken to help you find a way out of it.

Besides, I'm going to have enough to do for the next 20 years after this is over helping to clean up the mess you made. Ya'll asked for this, and if you're that intent on not only self-destruction, but my destruction and that of everybody else around you...ya'll deserve what you're gonna get.

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

Remember that.

Potter's Field

So, while I was on break at work last night, I saw on Twitter that Arizona Senator Jeff Flake gave a big speech decrying the current political mess...in which he also stated that he was not going to run for re-election.

I can respect that, it was a good speech. Never mind that Congressional Republicans are in it up to their eyeballs, regarding the creation of this mess.

Matthew 27New American Standard Bible (NASB)

Judas’s Remorse

27 Now when morning came, all the chief priests and the elders of the people conferred together against Jesus to put Him to death; 2 and they bound Him, and led Him away and delivered Him to Pilate the governor.

3 Then when Judas, who had betrayed Him, saw that He had been condemned, he felt remorse and returned the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, 4 saying, “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.” But they said, “What is that to us? See to that yourself!”5 And he threw the pieces of silver into the temple sanctuary and departed; and he went away and hanged himself. 6 The chief priests took the pieces of silver and said, “It is not lawful to put them into the temple treasury, since it is the price of blood.” 7 And they conferred together and with the money bought the Potter’s Field as a burial place for strangers. 8 For this reason that field has been called the Field of Blood to this day. 9 Then that which was spoken through Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled: “And [c]they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of the one whose price had been set by the sons of Israel; 10 and they gave them for the Potter’s Field, as the Lord directed me.”

But not long after Senator Flake's speech, the Senate voted to gut consumer protections, particularly in finance.

I have been saying for a long time now, that these people...old, rich supposedly-conservative white men who claim to be religious and whose power-base by and large is rooted in the Baby Boomer generation, people now in their 60's and 70's...know that they are on their way out. So, they have decided as a group that they are going to steal as much money as they can on the way out the door.

Hence the fact that Republicans are putting up with Donald Trump and with Trump's making a mess of our country, our international relations, and our politics in general. They are holding out for more tax cuts for the wealthy, even as the political situation makes passing any major legislation less likely, even as the Far-right (and a sector of it which really doesn't give a shit about rich people or tax cuts beyond possibly for their own funders, preferring a much more ideological, and ultimately racist agenda. Come on, you don't think "Economic Nationalism" really has anything to do with the good of the nation...or for that matter economics...do you? We'll get to that later) plots their destruction and a hostile takeover of the Republican Party.

What do they intend to replace it with? 

First, let me fill in a basic definition of Republican values as I learned them:

The basic values of conservatism as I was taught it could be summed up as "Personal responsibility, free enterprise, limited government and human dignity." Diversity was always considered kind of a default setting, other people's sexuality was none of my business. Religion was important on a personal level...but it was well understood that people had their own beliefs and that wasn't any of my business either. In fact, learning about other beliefs and cultures in order to properly understand people was considered important. Doing things right, keeping one's word, paying the bills, telling the truth...all these things rounded out a secular philosophy that had no small amount of grounding in the teachings of Christianity, but that accepted the validity of other faiths and their traditions.

A person who knows what they believe and is grounded in the practice and spiritual Truth of it is not threatened by other people's beliefs.

That is conservatism as I was taught it. Ironically, most of those same beliefs underpin modern Center-Left liberalism. That's basically why I'm a Democrat, although still on good terms with what old-school Republicans are still around.

Now, on to the meat of the matter;

There was something else I read last night, on a later break, that stated that a lot of conservative white Americans believe that white people are being discriminated against. In the specific example that one of the people quoted in the article gave...they complained that, basically, a Black person got the job and they didn't. There was no thought given to whether or not that Black person was more qualified, or had more relevant experience or skills, or other factors (such as being a college graduate or military veteran) that might have influenced the decision of whom to hire. Simply the fact that an African American got hired and they didn't was considered "discrimination against white people" by this white man.

Sorry, dude, but black folks need jobs too. If you didn't get the job, you didn't get the job. Maybe you should look at your own qualifications? Maybe give another line of work a try?

I'm sorry, but according to what I was taught, nobody should be entitled to just have stuff handed to them. No one is entitled to just get a job...least of all because of the color of their skin or some other ascribed status. If you don't have the education, experience, or whatever other qualifications are needed...you're not going to get the job.

So, try again, try harder. The agency is on you, here. Go to school, join the Army and learn a trade, whatever. You will (usually) have at least some control over your own life, use it.

The fact is that as time has gone on, over the course of the last century and a half, or so...and most particularly in the latter half of that time period, African Americans, women, and various other ethnic (and social, such as disabled people) minority groups have gained access to the needed education, governmental participation, increasing (though still not on a par with white folks) material wealth, social freedoms, and work experience needed to raise their own collective status in our society.

How did they do this? They fought for it, they worked for it, many people in all of these various groups were engaged and responsible citizens who petitioned the government for redress of grievances as the Constitution states that they have a right to...and in all of these streams of action no small percentage of these various peoples died for their rights or the rights of future generations to have everything that white men take for granted.

(...And no, they're still not all the way there yet.)

Some people have a problem with that, and think that the State should intervene on their behalf, to provide for them while denying others their opportunities and rights, on the basis of often-arbitrary, usually-ascribed status...and it is not just people of color, religious or sexual minorities or women that these people seek to Other. It's also white people...including white men, even conservative white men...who disagree with them, that are ending up on the hit list. 

In effect, these people, whether they are Alt-right Nazis or just plain grievance-driven angry old white people, want the government to preserve...if not expand...their white (and often, male) privilege while allowing them to trample on the rights of others no matter how basic or hard-earned or inalienable under the Constitution, nor whether or not those other people have always had those rights nor how hard they had to fight to get to exercise them nor whether that fighting was in the streets of Alabama, the skies over Germany, or the jungles of Vietnam.

They just. Plain. Don't. Care.

Perhaps more to the point...these people, whether they're some angry, frustrated, virginal young fat dude who sits behind a computer all day and doesn't work or some grizzled old coal miner who worked for decades, owns their own house and just wants a good-paying job again on their own terms...they actively want their success to come at the expense of other people.

I don't see how that's fair. I don't see how that's right. I don't see how that could ever be considered Christian, and I absolutely do not think that fits in with "Personal responsibility, free enterprise, limited government and human dignity" as I was taught the meanings of those words.

Hell, an awful lot of these people don't care if they get anything, or if they are successful, they just want to see somebody else suffer.

And that is just plain Wrong.

But, That is the exact nature of the political movement that is swallowing up the Republican Party and that's what people like Bob Corker, Jeff Flake and John McCain...whatever their faults or screwed-up politics...don't want to be a part of. They seem to have reconciled themselves to being unable to stop this garbage, at least on some level. They appear to be unafraid to be seen grabbing hand-fulls of cash on the way out the door...never mind the discredit such may do to their own words, later on. Never mind the damage it may do to the fortunes of the average citizen, or the nation as a whole.

This is the end result of 40 years of "Fuck you, I've got mine" and 50 years of stirring up racist sentiment...mostly with the aim of (in the long term) securing tax cuts for the wealthy and other gains for business and corporations at the expense of the common person.

...And now, they can't even get that done.

But they can sure as hell give contracts to fix Puerto Rico's electrical grid to some podunk tiny Montana town's little power company...never mind that that company doesn't have the capability, logistics or personnel to get a job of that scale done in any timely fashion whatsoever. But hey, some Trump donor gets a big paycheck, so it's all good, right?

Somehow, none of these people care that the people of Puerto Rico (the ones who still live there, at least) are struggling to survive, many with none of the basics of modern civilization that their fellow Americans on the mainland take for granted.

...And

Like I said, these "Conservatives" know their day is done soon, demographics and diversity, health problems and the simple tick-tock, tick-tock of the clock will see to that soon enough. If the President's garbled speeches and apparent mental problems (which suggest worsening dementia) are any indication, probably sooner.

The Republican Party...indeed...the entire Conservative movement, has changed from being a party of convictions and values to being the Party of A Man. When he goes...by whatever means...so do they.

As for what may replace them? Well, unless somebody comes up with something real fast it's probably going to be the idiots marching around with torches and shouting racist propaganda...and in a chilling development...a very large percentage of United States Armed Forces personnel, when polled, cited those people...not Muslims, not North Koreans, not Russians, and sure as hell not Terrorists...or at least as how that term is currently politically defined, as the gravest threat to our nation. If the military is damned well worried about White Nationalists, maybe the rest of us had best be on our guard?

(If you want a better country, you have to be better citizens. If you want to keep these assholes from taking power after the current batch of assholes goes down, you're going to have to work for it. As I have said...these nuts are organizing for next year's election. We'd best get busy and keep at it. The alternative could make The Handmaid's Tale or the Chinese Communist surveillance state in Xinjiang look tame by comparison...remember, American fanatics are almost never happy with anything. Imagine what such people will do with an ideology that's based around the idea that Other People don't have an inherent right to exist.)

But it's all good as long as Bob Corker, Jeff Flake and John McCain get that one last payday from their connections in the banking industry on the way out the door, right?

Just give the mess these assholes are leaving us some thought, will you? And I say that as somebody who respects these guys, at least a little bit...and who used to have some points of agreement with them.

If you want a better country, you have to be a better citizen. If the line on what constitutes being a decent person moves, so that you have to switch political parties or vote for somebody that you may not have 20 years ago, you do that. The line on what is right and what is wrong has not moved. How ever we may individually interpret that line...there have to be some things we all can agree on.

Otherwise, we don't have a civilization.

(...And you don't try to grab one more handful of cash on the way out the door. Sometimes, the proper thing to do is just leave...)

Oh, and the title?

A Potter's Field is defined in American and European Christian tradition as a place of burial for indigent or unknown people or those who lack relatives able to care for the disposition of their remains postmortem. The term is of Biblical origin, referring to a ground that was dug for clay used in making pottery, later purchased by the priests of the Temple in Jerusalem for the burial of criminals, the poor, and strangers.

I think the mental image of the desolation and emptiness that such a term or its description conjures up is oddly fitting in describing what has become of the soul of our nation right now.

Either we bury the Nazis there, or they will bury us there.

Beyond even that, how do we fix it? That's on us.

It's worth remembering that much of the American church is more synonymous with money and power and privilege than with being in opposition to such things and caring for the poor and the stranger, which is what Christ commanded of His believers.

Politics and religion are about ideas. The Truth is most often about people.

Jesus Christ knew that. Why don't we?

Matthew 6:24King James Version (KJV)

24 No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

Freedom.

As I've mentioned, I have ferrets. 

This little guy isn't one of mine, rather, he was one of the ferrets that was for sale at my local pet store a couple of years ago.

When I'm there, I usually take the pet store ferrets out of the cage and play with them, to give them some time out. That's what this little guy was doing, camping out in this cat bed I was going to buy and really enjoying himself.

At home, I let my ferrets...currently, all 29 of them...out for several hours per day. It's hilarious when I let them out. One of my younger guys, Barack, always hops around happily chattering and Dooking as he revels in the freedom of simply being outside of his cage. Many of my other ferrets have similar little rituals or things that they do. Some inspect stash spots, others head for the corner by the door for their morning poop, still others bother the dog.

Ferrets like to have...and greatly enjoy having...their freedom.

Are we, or any other creature on this earth, any different?

Some days I wonder...

I saw on Twitter the other day that Republican senate candidate Roy Moore said that it was illegal to not stand for the National Anthem. (Here's a hint; the Law advises that people should stand for the anthem, it does not say that they must nor establish any legal penalty for not doing so. The law is an advisement of behavior, not a requirement of conduct.) Last night, I saw that he came right out and said "It's the law, if we disobey that, what else will we disobey?" Well, the Constitution, apparently. Setting aside the obvious Constitutional issues and the slippery-slope logical fallacy, I'll never understand these people's obsession with demanding outward displays of faith or patriotism when they're busy proposing things that would undermine (if not destroy) the very values that the Flag of the United States stands for.

Without those values, the flag is just a symbol, a tribal totem.

Like the Fundamentalist version of Jesus, it's reduced to being a dead rabbit on a stick, carried as a battle standard by a gang, in effect.

Perhaps more to the point, without some degree of values, what are we? Now I'm not talking about ascribing to a particular political philosophy or religion, I'm talking about basic human values, compassion, empathy, freedom...for everybody, not just a select few.

People like Donald Trump and Roy Moore, they talk about "Freedom" a lot. But, freedom to do what? (Mostly, in their minds, the freedom to do whatever the hell they tell you to do and that's about it.) They sure seem to like the freedom to have guns.

But what about something simpler, like (for example) the freedom to be alive, or to be able to walk down the street without having to worry about being shot by some nut?

What about the freedom of African Americans to not be abused, mistreated, or murdered by the Police?

What about the freedom of sick people to be able to have health insurance so that they can function as normally as possible, or even simply stay alive?

Sorry to point out reality, but freedom doesn't do one damned bit of good if you're not alive to enjoy it.

Freedom does not give one person the right to trample on another person's freedom or rights, either by force or by using the power of the State.

Yes, it is a freedom and a right to believe what one wants, as well as to be able to be armed that one may defend oneself and their beliefs or family or property if needed. It is not freedom, to try to force your beliefs on somebody else either at gunpoint or by using the power of the State in any way, shape or form.

I'm a gun owner, and I started out as a conservative.

The values I was taught as a Christian, a conservative and a young Republican effectively make me a Democrat today. Given what I was taught, it never ceases to amaze me that the only "freedoms" that matter to so many of these people today seem to be that they want the government, the nation, or even the world to be forced to mirror their beliefs or opinions, at gunpoint if needed. They don't seem to care if anybody else actually believes what they do...they just want to make everybody else go through the motions so that they can continue to feel good about themselves and their own choices.

I'm frankly getting tired of this bullshit.

A common sticking point is "religious freedom" which in modern right-wing nut-speak basically boils down to they want to claim religion as an excuse to be able to discriminate and force their bullshit on everybody else.

When Roy Moore says "the source of our morality" that's bullshit right there, a weasel word (no insult to weasels intended, but that's the term.) Then there was this bullshit:

 We have forgotten that our inalienable rights come from God, not Man. OK, theoretically, I can agree with that, but what Inalienable Rights? Define this. Show your work. If we're talking Constitutional rights, whether those rights as originally enumerated in our founding documents or as they currently stand, in their expanded form thanks to legislation and the courts?

Funny thing, on either count Roy Moore actually completely fails.

No, seriously, this motherfucker believes that the Bible, or at least his own twisted interpretation of it, ought to be the supreme law of the land.

...And he calls that "Freedom."

No, you son of a bitch. It's not freedom if you and your people, or your social class or you yourself are the only ones who have it.

Freedom, or what constitutes being free, is greatly relative depending on one's culture or situation.

I'm just saying, I sit here right now typing away on this and drinking a beer not long after reading about the fall of Raqqa and the collapse of the main body of the Islamic State. I saw the article on Twitter when I got home (having, for other reasons, already stopped at the grocery store and bought a single bottle of one of their oddball beer brands.) I Retweeted it so I could find it to read it later, and I've been thinking about just how deliciously ironic that set of coincidences turned out to be, not that I'm a big believer in coincidence.

I remember reading not too long ago, that Iraqi kids in Mosul have finally been able to go back to school after two long years. Surely, it must be freedom for those kids to be able to go back to school?

Awhile back, I read an article about the Kurdish fighters largely responsible for the conduct of the ground war against Daesh and I remember that the article said the Kurdish troops kept finding a lot of discarded Hijab made from black cloth. Obviously, for a woman in that sort of situation it must have been hell to constantly have to wear a head scarf, especially given that in Syria, many women do not veil in the first place.

Now, just a thought, but lets put the shoe on the other foot for a minute, and go a bit east. In the Chinese autonomous region of XinJiang, a predominately Muslim region of China that's wracked by a conflict between Uyghur separatists and the Chinese government, military and police, I can almost guarantee you that there's a lot that a Uyghur Muslim woman might give, to be able to wear that Hijab without the risk of being hassled by the Police. In turn, the Police might give somebody a hard time for things we consider so basic that it's literally nobody's business. A man might be harassed or even arrested for growing a beard, families get harassed for naming their sons Muhammad, and stuff like that. Also, those who serve in the military or the police or who work for the government are forbidden from religious practice. Public school students are also discouraged from religion, though it is not banned, and while private citizens officially have religious freedom, they face an unofficial but state-backed campaign of harassment. These people live in a pervasive surveillance state. I'm not joking, you can look this up for yourself. Yet the attacks, bombings, stabbings, the very occasional firefight, continue. Perhaps those who want to impose a totalitarian state in America might take note of this? No matter what the government does, people continue to resist.

At the same time, elsewhere in China the Hui Muslims have full rights and religious freedom and do not face any problems from the State...simply because they do not have a separatist movement and are not engaged in a conflict with the government.

I often communicate via Facebook with a man named Joseph, who lives in Uganda and works as a teacher, with farming and running a support program for orphaned children. This dude is a Christian and his program is run through a United Methodist church. The poverty he talks about that the kids, and his people more generally must deal with shocks me. Just supporting schooling for some of these kids at a time consumes an inordinate amount of this guy's time and energy. The amount of money I spend on ferret food would seriously go a long way toward supporting a person in Uganda. That is not an exaggeration. Now, for myself, and again speaking as a former conservative...is it freedom to have, or not to have, economic or educational opportunities?

Some rich people in THIS country seem to think that they should have the "freedom" to deny educational opportunities, or basic rights or decent treatment to American kids.

The only freedom that matters to these motherfuckers is the freedom to make money.

What good is freedom if you don't have the knowledge to exercise it properly, nor the knowledge to defend one's freedom and rights in the voting booth or through civic action and due process and political engagement??

A lot of these idiots, particularly on the low-class end of the spectrum, want to force a fight, because they think they'd win if it came to that.

Wrong. Not least because a hell of a lot of these fools are basing their opinions on bigotry and

stereotypes. Plenty of liberals have guns and would act rationally in a conflict. Some people know this and are afraid of it.

Chances are very good that, given the idiocy of a lot of these people...if they ever got their wish and forced their political opponents into open conflict, that they'd probably lose, because they are nuts. Unlike the Chinese, who as harsh as their measures might be they are still founded in rationality, were all over the place with our madness. But still, no matter what, there would be conflict and likely also excessive casualties...where in the conflict in Xinjiang, the casualty rate has been fairly low.

What some of these right-wing nuts want to do here, and indeed globally, would make the Chinese look like free thinkers and saints by comparison...and these people would call this "freedom."

This morning on Twitter I saw a post by some nut who apparently wanted to "meet liberals on the field of battle" thinking he'd get a chance to shoot women in pink kitty hats.

No, that's not how this works. On the field of battle the other side shoots back, war is horrible, and war is hell.

Here's the thing, every petty tyrant in the world, every dictator that has ever been...desires absolute freedom for themselves...and subjugation for everybody else.

In order for not only individuals, but a society, to be free...everybody has to give a little. In the United States of America, individual rights are being used as a club with which to beat on the rights of the overall population.

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

Think about that, take all the time you need.

 How do I feel? I feel joyless. My brothers remain behind. Imprisoned. Suppressed. I don't just mean my Muslim brothers; I mean every single man who will sleep in here tonight. Who is cut off from everything that he loves. Cut off from his own self. You know, as the word went around that the governor was going to give someone clemency, I saw a rift develop. As each inmate wished himself to be the chosen one. The longing to be free became as palpable as the food that we eat. But it is a meal I am being *served* right now. And I am Muslim, and Allah does not allow me to... swallow certain things. Allah does not allow me to take scraps from the hands of a man such as this. A man who is corrupt and immoral. A man who denigrates the gift of clemency just as he violates the principles of justice. A man that gave the order to cause the death of eight people. And so, Governor Devlin, because even the cost of freedom can be too high, I *refuse* your pardon! ~Kareem Said, Episode 8, Season 2 "Escape from Oz" from the HBO series "Oz."

Gunpowder Jesus.

Ever Google Something, and then immediately wish you hadn't? Yeah, I just did that. This picture of Jesus with what appears to be an Old West style Sharps repeating carbine was one of a credible number of such that came up when I Googled "Cowboy Jesus."

For a real treat, Google "Armed Jesus" and you'll see pages and pages of this garbage, including the same exact picture of Jesus with a dozen different weapons Photoshopped into it. I'm not kidding.

As a former Christian I find this disturbing.

Why is this relevant?

Because I saw this last night:

Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), who was shot and badly wounded over the summer, complained the media did not often report the good news about guns.

That's why.

As I posted on Facebook last night "Am I the only one who hears "have you heard the good news about gun violence" in the same tone as "have you heard the good news about Jesus Christ?"

I've been going to write something, over and above my own Facebook post on the subject, about the mass shooting in Las Vegas on Sunday night, but nothing quite came together...until this.

I've been saying for years that this Right-wing shit has become a cult. and the whole gun-humping thing goes hand in hand with that unfortunately.

I'm a gun owner, I currently own half a dozen different weapons, not all of which are used (I have no reason to shoot my Dad's reproduction Civil War .57 Caliber Enfield musket and the bruise it left on my shoulder when I last fired it as a younger and healthier man was persuasive enough not to give me another one now) and most of which I inherited from my Dad or my Grandfather. I used to hunt and target shoot regularly, now I just go when I can. I grew up around guns, my Dad was a civil war re-enactor and an avid hunter. I'm also a former NRA member, which goes hand in hand with the fact that I used to be a conservative and a Republican...in more than one way. A number of the old retired guys active in local Republican politics that I used to hang out with were NRA members also, one had been employed by the organization in his last few working years...as a firearms instructor.

I've also always, even back in those days, supported common-sense gun control measures...if grudgingly at times. I agreed with the original Assault Weapons ban passed under Bill Clinton, simply because I've never felt that military-style rifles were something that civilians needed to have access to. An awful lot of people that I've discussed this issue with felt the same way, including family members, some of whom were conservatives.

So, why, when we just had the worst mass shooting in modern US history, with 527 wounded, and 59 killed...that's right, almost 600 total casualties...600 PEOPLE...why is it that conservatives are so determined to deny, distract, and rationalize about the fact that this happened?

This is what I wrote a couple days ago:

As we're all aware, there was a mass shooting on Sunday night that resulted in a total of 586 casualties including at last count 59 fatalities. That is, almost 600 PEOPLE were affected by this tragedy.

Anybody who takes this as an opportunity to complain about anything Hillary Clinton or "The Left" is doing will be summarily unfriended, and you'll be damned lucky if I don't cuss you out first.

Firstly, they are out of power, secondly, it's just low class.

Jesus Christ, what the fuck is even wrong with people?

How many people have to die or be injured before we all recognize our common humanity and DO something about this problem?!?!

I'm a gun owner, on a general level I support the 2nd Amendment, and I am both a former conservative and a former NRA member. I have no desire to ban guns. So far as I know, I don't know anyone who wants to. However, If some additional regulations and/or harsher punishments for gun crimes will help deal with this problem I can support that.

Mentally ill people do not need access to weapons.

As far as I'm concerned no civilian needs access to military-grade rifles or armor-piercing bullets or suppressors, and I'm damned questionable about the idea of civilians having access to rounds like 5.56mm NATO standard that are optimized to kill human beings.

A 5.56mm round is not for hunting animals, it's for killing people. It's not much bigger than a .22 shell but that doesn't matter, because it is intended to fragment and do some very fucked up things to the human body.

You want to have that AR-15, get it adapted to fire .22 Long Rifle rounds like a military training rifle.

If you are so afraid of...whatever...that you feel the only answer is more weapons and/or more violence, just do us both a favor and don't talk to me.

If you want to take the latest tragedy and use it to air political gripes, don't talk to me.

We just had an attack on our people by some deranged and yes, WHITE, nut job that caused almost 600 casualties including 59 deaths.

No, he was not DAESH (or even a Muslim, or even religious so I've heard) or Antifa (his family said he had no real political affiliation) or even a veteran that was some kind of a mental case. This was an ordinary, except for apparently being well-off, plain old normal Old White Man.

If you want to be in denial about that, and about the fact that he was apparently radicalized somewhere other than an ISIS website, do it somewhere else.

If your first thought isn't "Damn, that's fucked up" or your ONLY answer is more "thoughts and prayers" crap? Don't talk to ME, because I sure as a motherfucker don't wanna talk to YOU.

If we don't act to make an effort to stop the violence it's going to continue and probably get worse. We are the ONLY First World nation that has so much death and violence, and while I suspect that problem is going to require dealing with a lot more than just the gun issue, we have to try.

Yes, people have a constitutional right to have a weapon, but people also have a right to NOT have to worry about getting shot while walking down the street and people have a right to abhor violence, just as much as I and a lot of other people have the right to understand that violence is wrong, but sometimes necessary.

More to the point, I was taught violence should be the last resort, not the first choice. I started out as a Christian, back when that word actually meant something.

And I'm sick of the violence.

This came about because a lady that I know, who is a ferret breeder and part-time NRA firearms instructor made a point of writing a post to bash Hillary Clinton's comments regarding the Las Vegas shooting.

I mean, on the one hand, when don't these people take an opportunity to bash Hillary Clinton, but the fact that doing so took precedence even over the usual "Thoughts and Prayers" bullshit told me a whole hell of a lot more than I wanted to know about that lady and I just decided I had enough, and I unfriended her, left her ferret group and then wrote that post.

But the real problem here isn't the guns, or at least, guns and their attitude about guns are a symptom of the real issue.

It's actually much worse.

What it really comes down to is belief in life as a zero-sum game, bug-eyed religious fanaticism, deviant interpretations of religious doctrines, small-minded fearful superstition...and the fact that there are just some people in (or willing to claim) American Christianity who never got over (or they never understood, and are thus dominated by) the origins of Judaism and later Christianity out of the same deep dark well of nasty Middle Eastern mythology that gave the world the same Caananite, Carthaginian and Phoenician religions whose gods we mostly only know because they are named as demons and devils in the Bible.

There are those who look at Abraham's preparations to sacrifice Isaac, and the various lists of sacrificial offerings in the Old Testament not as some outmoded form of transactions with the Almighty that was superseded by the coming of Christ, but as some sort of ultimate expression of faithfulness. Such leads to a belief in scarcity as sacredness, combined with their own entitled belief that they're entitled to resources, and some pretty bizarre interpretations of the Bible and human nature. These people in particular are intensely tribal in mentality, you can imagine what they think of modernity, much less science, and they are loud enough that just one or two of them can disrupt a church to the point where it no longer functions, unless everybody else gets together and decides they aren't having it. I've seen it happen.

At the last church I went to, we had this guy...Clayton...who couldn't wait every Sunday to regale the Pastor and anybody else who'd listen with his tales of arguing with Atheists and people who believed in Evolution. He wasn't trying to win anybody over, he just wanted to fight about it. More to the point, he wanted to be seen doing so.

That leads to another kind of bug-eyed fanatic...ultimately to those kind of Trump Supporters who just want to be seen giving the world the middle finger.

That guy? Almost everybody just rolled their eyes at him. Nobody really cared. Nobody wanted to hear it...and eventually he just went somewhere else. Unfortunately...it was just to another church in the same association where his viewpoint got more play.

Get enough of those people in an organization, and they push everybody else out.

These people, and the holy rollers and the prosperity gospel nuts? They dominate American Christianity in the era of Donald Trump.

They are all scared to death of their small, angry, fearful god and hiding under their beds and in their Bibles from terrors both real and (far more often) imagined, and they provide a fertile ground for conspiracy theories to take root in and they all have guns.

To them, a gun is power.

When your "God" and the devil are indistinguishable save whose "side" you're on and you don't understand life, where life comes from, or the purpose of life...and often, the actual physical reality of your life is hard because (you think) people think you're an asshole (and even/especially if you are) well eventually, you start to think about death. Once you start thinking about death-and especially if you're a small-minded, fearful asshole to start with-then it's not a big leap to think that the ultimate power is not the creation of life, but the ending of it.

And what's the easiest way to end somebody's life? Guns.

It sometimes amazes me that we don't have more explicitly religious (Christian) terrorists. But then, that would require these people to get off the couch and stop watching FOX News.

We got a lot of real problems in this country right now, and Hillary Clinton and "The Left" ain't one.

A real big part of the problem is we have a lot of entitled white guys who want to sit on the couch and eat cake while still losing weight and somehow getting rich at the same time.

A lot of these people who take the path of least resistance through life? They think guns are their big equalizer against those more motivated, richer, or smarter than themselves.

My friend CJ showed me this Facebook post that attempted to justify price gouging and trickle-down economics using Jim the Plumber and Mike the millionaire as examples, there's a disaster and they walk into a store to buy the last bottle of water...which Steve the store clerk then sells to Mike the millionaire for $2,000. The post then posits that eventually, Mike's money somehow something something Ronald Reagan praise Jesus trickles back down to Jim without mentioning that by that point, if Jim hasn't gotten help from some government disaster relief agency he's most likely died of thirst.

My response? Yeah, that scenario only works out if everyone meekly accepts the terms of it, nobody decides to go without or otherwise not play, and Jim the Plumber doesn't pull out a gun, blast the other two guys in the face and walk out with his bottle of water.

And that, right there, is the problem. When people spend decades crunching up Pascal's Wager into powder and snorting it off stained-glass windows you get belief systems that don't work unless everybody plays by very specific, narrow sets of rules. That's why things, especially on the conservative side of the fence, are such a mess right now.

No matter how much firepower individuals or the State have, there are many ways for the other side to win. Insurgency is one, another is non-violent protest. When faced with a more powerful opponent you simply meet them on terms that are not favorable to that power. You change the rules of the game and in any conflict of any kind, the side that wins is not the one with the most firepower or resources or the best logistics, necessarily, but the side with the most will to fight and the capability to shift that willpower into effective action while operating from a reality-based framework regarding events.

Just sayin' this is probably all gonna go a lot easier and have a lot fewer casualties if random nuts don't have access to automatic weapons.

If it goes that way, the nuts aren't going to stop and ask you if you're a conservative or a liberal before they decide whether or not to shoot you, they're just going to do it, because the act of shooting you, and their gun? Those are the things they really believe in, and they want to demand of the rest of us that they have an easy life. All the talk about Jesus and conservative politics is mostly markers of tribal loyalty.

Remember, most of the victims in Vegas were probably conservatives.

That angry old white terrorist didn't care. He shot them anyway. As I also said, later;

I think that guy should be labeled as a Terrorist, for one thing. One doesn't need to have a "clear political motivation" to be a terrorist, some people are just nihilists, seeking to create social disruption and chaos. Some people are just angry, and want to get even with the world for some (most often imagined) slight or another. That might not be a political objective, but it's still an objective, that they seek to realize through terror. I would in fact argue that the politicization and racialization of the term "Terrorist" makes it less useful, but it's all we have at the moment. Also, and this goes back to my old-school conservative upbringing...if you need to be handed opportunities or have the world set up to serve you in order to succeed or feel good about yourself...then you didn't deserve those opportunities in the first place. Whoever is qualified or motivated enough to take advantage of them should be the one who gets them. The fact that a lot of the time that's NOT white people these days? Nobody's fault but white people's for not getting an education, or keeping pace with the times, or simply doing the easy work of rolling with social change on the (actually, pretty conservative) grounds that odds are, it's none of our business. Simply the fact that in my hometown, there's a lot of doctors whose names I can't pronounce very well and an awful lot of the rest are obviously immigrants...is not the fault of those people for coming and "taking" those jobs from some American. It's that those are the people who were willing to do the work and get the education to have that medical practice in the first damn place. If you want a free market, damn it that free market is going to go with the labor force it has, not the labor force some rando wants. These idiots want the world to serve them...but they don't want to do the work or have the leadership skills or maintain the good conduct and reputation that it takes to be real leaders in the first place. So, conservative white dudes ought not to be surprised that they're being replaced. Sometimes, when you stand in the way of history and progress yelling "Stop!" you're just gonna get rolled over, and I'm all out of sympathy at this point.

Doesn't matter if you vote blue or red, the blood's the same color either way.

The reality is that a lot of these people view their Self as God and their gun as the lightning bolts of that God, and if they have to, they'll invent enemies to smite. Maybe we'd do well to start giving them less powerful thunderbolts, just a thought.

The God and Guns thing is a symptom, yes, but it's a hell of a lot easier to get somebody to talk to you and actually deal with the problem if they can't just throw down and shoot you for bringing it up.

If we want our nation to continue to exist, we'd best start dealing with some of these problems. You can't bomb or shoot your way into having a better nation.

If we want a better nation, we have to be better citizens, and we have to stop living in fear and thinking force will solve our problems.

The real Jesus didn't have a gun and wouldn't have needed one in any case. What good are bullets against He who authored the concept of physics in the first place? Also, Firearms were not even invented for another 1200 years or so.

Maybe if more people understood those simple historical and theological concepts and really believed them, we wouldn't have some of these problems.